Unicode I believe (But I've been confused over Ascii & such for awhile)
Basiclly I went into Microsoft Word, and inserted a lot of special characters (some worked on this site, some did not) I then picked the ones that worked, copy-pasted all those symbols to a message to myself here - then whenever I want to use something, I go to that message and copy-paste it.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Some of the special characters MAY not work for all users in all countries (and all systems). I have not heard of anyone complaining that it did not work yet, but it is possible - so....... :-)